ABSTRACT
In another passage Eliot remarks, 'Someone said: "the dead writers are remote
from us because we know so much more than they did". Precisely, and they are
I have been thinking about Hopkins in the light of his essay. How far do
Eliot's formulations help us to understand Hopkins, how far, indeed, can they
apply to him at all? What was Hopkins's relation to the dead poets, those who
had gone before? And, now, as we commemorate Hopkins's centenary, what
are his relations to those who have come after? We know that Hopkins read widely in English poetry, and there are many signs of his poetic interests in the letters and notebooks. There is a rather engaging diary entry made at the age of
nineteen, when Hopkins refers to a collection of portraits of famous poets and
painters which were presumably going into his rooms at Oxford: Raphael, Tennyson, Shelley, Keats, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Diirer.2 We see in his correspondence, particularly to his fellow poets, Bridges and Dixon, a continuing discussion of English poets, major and minor. At the centre of his personal pantheon are Shakespeare and Milton. Hopkins writes to Alexander
Baillie at the age of twenty, 'Shakespear is and must be utterly the greatest of poets'. 3 There are many expressions of admiration for Milton. He tells Dixon in 1878, 'His verse as one reads it seems something necessary and eternal (so to me does Purcell's music) ... Milton's art is incomparable, not only in English
Literature, but, I shd. think, almost in any ... '.4 Interestingly enough, Hopkins
saw Milton's style as plain, severe and balanced rather than as artificial or
Baroque. As he wrote to Bridges in 1879, 'No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style' .5 For an
English poet to admire Milton and Shakespeare is not to imply very much
about creative and usable influences. Indeed, the influence of Shakespeare and
of Milton has often been something that poets needed to escape, because it is so massive and almost oppressive. Certainly the history of English poetic drama from the Jacobeans to T.S. Eliot has been a series of imperfect attempts to
come to terms with and perhaps shake off the Shakespearian influence. In our
own age Eliot found Milton's influence constricting and undesirable. Keats,
early on in his short career, had been a Miltonic poet. But he then says of Milton in one of his letters, 'Life to him would be death to me' .6 Keats had to escape Milton's influence in order to write the poetry he wanted to write.
